Installing-signed-GPLPV-drivers

From Univention Wiki

Out of Maintenance: Xen is no longer supported by any maintained UCS release. As such the GPLPV drivers are also no longer supported by Univention. We recommend to switch to the new drivers provided by Xen itself: https://xenbits.xen.org/pvdrivers/win/

The GPLPV driver is a driver for Microsoft Windows, which enables Windows DomU systems virtualised in Xen to access the network and block drivers of the Xen Dom0. This provides a significant performance and reliability gain over the standard devices emulated by Xen/QEMU.

The GPLPV driver is a free software driver developed by James Harper. He maintains the sources in the Xen.org mercurial version control system, but the current official build are only test-signed, i.e. they are not recognised to be trusted Windows drivers. While this doesn't pose problems for older versions of Windows (for which you only need to acknowledge a warning during installation), the 64 bit version of Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 2008 server / 2012 server enforce the use of signed drivers. The only workaround for these drivers is to enable the test mode using bcdedit. This, however, has the disadvantage that a note about the test mode is displayed on the desktop and that using the test mode voids the warranty of some applications.

The directory includes SHA256 hashes of the individual MSI files in the file hashes-0.11.0.373.txt.asc. This file is signed with the PGP key used for the security updates for Univention Corporate Server (2CBDA4B0).

There are different MSI installer packages for the various Windows releases, which can be started with a simple double click. The "typical" installation should cover most use cases. The Windows installations need to be updated to the current service packs before installing the GPLPV drivers. E.g., using the GPLPV driver on Windows XP w/o SP3 is not possible.

2. The test-signed drivers need to be removed in the system settings module fo uninstalling software. The component to be uninstalled is labelled "GPL PV Drivers for Windows", the five subelemenents below are deinstalled along with the main package. The final question, whether the system should be rebooted now, needs to be answered with "No".

3. Execute uninstall_0.10.x.bat

4. Reboot the system.

5. Now the Univention-signed MSI package can be installed as described above. After successul installation the system must be rebooted.

6. Finally test mode can be deactivated by entering the command "bcdedit /set testsigning off". This setting only takes effect after a reboot.